Object Oriented Software Maintenance in Presence of Indirect Coupling

Maintenance of deployed software is an important phase of software lifecycle. Estimation of maintenance effort in object oriented software engineering is one of the major challenges. In object oriented software the maintenance effort is highly correlated with coupling among classes. It is widely accepted that there is strong relationship between high coupling and poor maintainability. The existing metrics sometimes do not depict the effect of the key factors which contribute significantly towards maintenance effort. Indirect coupling which manifests between two seemingly unrelated classes through hidden connections plays a major role in determining maintenance effort. This research proposes metrics which estimates the maintenance effort for software having indirect coupling between classes.